Re:Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
by JumpCrisscross on Monday December 15, 2025 @06:24PM
(#46282395)
At this scale could you do shielding?
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Re:Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
by mjhay on Monday December 15, 2025 @06:36PM
(#46282553)
Orbital data centers are impractical for a lot of reasons (to put it mildly) but radiation shielding isn’t one of them. Proportionally less shielding is needed as one scales up, due to lower surface/volume ratios.
Re:Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
by ted_dunning on Monday December 15, 2025 @06:42PM
(#46282635)
Sure. At the cost of lofting that shielding from the ground and taking the economics from 500x to 2000x crazy.
Re:Economics of Orbital vs. Terrestrial Data Centers
by inejge on Tuesday December 16, 2025 @12:39AM
(#46285171)
There are ways in which shielding in space can do harm: really energetic particles get trapped and produce a shower of daughter particles and rays over a greater area. So you'd need even more shielding. Or you accept that such things will happen and use rad-hard parts, redundancy etc. When you have the whole atmosphere above, it's much less of a concern.
Besides, that's even more mass to be lofted. Pushing the economics further into the ludicrous end.